Human Experience = User Experience + Customer Experience + More

As we head into 2020, I’m still obsessed with the integration of human experience. My work over the last two decades in technology has often been centered on the user or the customer. What I began to realize was first of all that when we talk about the “user“ or the “customer“ that we are always talking about humans, and that it benefits us to think in a more holistic human context when we do that.

Now I find I’m not as interested in user or customer experience as I am in human experience: what does it mean to optimize for the human experience; what does it mean to be human at all; how can that apply to businesses, marketing, to schools, to hospitals, and well beyond.

But I also find that when business focuses on improving human experience in alignment with what the business objectives are, the chances for success increase. This is why in my books and keynotes and beyond I always talk about “human-centric digital transformation.” With emerging technology, because of the increased capacity and scale that it offers, it’s becoming increasingly important that that alignment is in place so that we don’t scale unintended consequences.

I believe some of the biggest opportunities right now for the future of human experience — and indeed the future of humanity in general — are in looking at the ways online meets offline, customer meets user, employee meets candidate, global meets local, how the gig economy is shaking up the work landscape, and on and on.

We’ll have to think about context, environment, culture, aesthetics, identity. We’ll have to think about the human journey instead of the customer journey.

We’ll have to think about metrics that measure the human experience. What will those be? How do you measure fulfillment? A life well lived?

This moment in history feels very chaotic, where automation, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies are rapidly changing our vision of even the near future. Meanwhile, 70-80% of CEOs think the next 3 years are more critical than the past 50. We’re clearly in a truly transformative time.

So there’s tremendous opportunity for UX and CX professionals to put a stake in the ground on behalf of a wider lens on humanity, and advocate for integrated human experiences in the midst of machine-driven interactions and transactions, to make them as meaningful as possible.